Cy of relief
Now is not the time for Yankees to overreact after narrow defeats vs, two Cy Young winners
The Yankees may have struggled against a couple of Cy Young winners, but they need to keep the approach that got them to the ALCS.
READY for The Post’s suggestion of how the Yankees can fix their offense? Here it is: Change nothing besides the designated hitter, again, for American League Championship Series Game 3 on Monday night at Yankee Stadium. Matt Holliday has enjoyed some success against his old National League Central neighbor and Astros Game 3 starter Charlie Morton, including a homer earlier this season in The Bronx, so slot Holliday at DH.
To try anything else, however, be it a benching or a lineup reshuffling, would scream of panic. It would send exactly the wrong message to a Yankees team that has established a trademark of not panicking. The Yankees seem to agree. “I’m going to stick with it,” Joe Girardi said of his lineup Sunday, in a news conference at the Stadium. “You know, [we’re] one or two hits away from being 2-0. So I don’t see many changes.”
Their closeness to being up two games to nothing, rather than their actual opposite status, says far, far more about their outstanding pitching, which allowed just four runs over two games, than their offense, which scored just two runs in two games. No matter.
What says the most about their offense is their two losses resulted from facing a pair of past Cy Young Award winners in Dallas Keuchel and Justin Verlander on the road. Back home, where they hit so much better — they posted an .817 regular-season OPS at the Stadium and .755 away — and with the non-decorated Morton pitching Game 3 and either Lance McCullers or Brad Peacock starting Game 4, they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
You know what says next to nothing about their offense? Their high strikeout count and their supposed reliance on the home run.
Their homers, strikeouts and walks are intertwined; they work the count, which produces both whiffs and bases on balls, and their appetite for power will result in a few more swings and misses, sure. And the final numbers bear out the approach. In the regular season, among AL teams, the Yankees finished first in home runs (241) and walks (616) and sixth in strikeouts (1,386).
“That’s part of who we are right now,” Girardi said. “We walk. We’re patient. And we hit home runs and we strike out.”
“I like the patience, I like the grittiness of the hitters, I like how they grind out at-bats. And we’ll figure it out.”
As for the old and tired lament about the Yankees needing to play more “small ball,” with bunts and hit-and-runs and anything else that would’ve made Ty Cobb proud, the Yankees generated 46.7 percent of their runs via the long ball, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, ranking them sixth overall in the majors. Nevertheless, they possess more athleticism than their recent predecessors thanks to guys like Didi Gregorius, Aaron Hicks, Aaron Judge and holdover Brett Gardner.
“I think we’re capable of doing things. I think we’re capable of running,” Girardi said. “We have certain guys that can run on our team. We have guys that go from first to third. We just haven’t got a lot of hits.”
Five hits in each game, to be precise, with one from Judge and zero from Gary Sanchez. Yes, both Judge (.528 OPS, with 19 strikeouts in 31 at-bats) and Sanchez (.582 OPS with 15 strikeouts in 34 at-bats) are having brutal first journeys through October. You can attribute them to perhaps anxiety, perhaps fatigue, perhaps some undisclosed injury or some from each column. You’ve also seen both of them go through poor stretches before and fight their way through them.
“We’ve counted on them all year,” Girardi said of the franchise’s young cornerstones. “We believe in them, and I think they’re going to come out of it.”
Even if they don’t, it’s better to stick with them and accept the consequences.
The Yankees find themselves in a bonus round — in a postseason ahead of schedule, in the ALCS after being near-dead in the AL Division Series. There will be no shame if they can’t come back against the impressive Astros. But there will be disappointment if they overreact to two lousy games against two great pitchers.